Professor David Crystal is widely acknowledged as the world’s foremost expert on the English language. He’s published over 100 books on English, among them the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language, now in its third edition.
Professor Crystal was a keynote speaker at the 2019 Better Learning Conference at Robinson College in Cambridge. I caught up with him after his talk to ask about the changing nature of English and what it means for teachers – here are the highlights.
We can learn a lot from playing with language
As Professor Crystal explains, language play is all around us, and it’s something that is done by working professionals as much as children. Advertising and newspaper headlines are good examples of how people often play with language in a professional context.
Another example, one we all come across early in life, is the way in which people speak to babies (or sometimes pets!), which is very exaggerated in its falling pitch, in the shape of the mouth, and which includes a lot of repetition.
All of these things seem to help small children find a way into the language, so perhaps there is something that we can take from that as teachers: providing plenty of support to learners in the early stages by clearly modelling pronunciation and by offering plenty of repetition.
English is changing (but not that much!)
While new words enter the English language every day, English is essentially the same as it was 30 years ago – if you travelled back in time to 1990, you wouldn’t have any problems speaking the same English to people then as you speak nowadays.
However, there are some recent changes to the language that are quite interesting. One is in the use of the word must, as in you must do your homework. Over the past decade or so, usage of must has been in decline, often being replaced by have to or should. This might suggest that English-speaking society has become less hierarchical and more equal.
The other prominent change has been in what is known as ‘quotative like’. This is a usage of like to report speech, such as I was like ‘what have you done?’. It is more common to hear this among young adults than I said…, which was previously how speech was most frequently reported. But quotative like is different in that it can be used not just to report speech, but also facial expressions, and even shouts and screams!
Teenagers are better language users than they get credit for
It’s easy to think that teenagers, more interested in Snapchat than Shakespeare, might be developing their language skills more slowly than previous generations, who spent more time reading books. But Professor Crystal explains that in fact research suggests they are more literate than their parents were in adolescence, because messaging friends all the time means they are spending many hours a day reading and writing, and practising language use.
In fact, linguistic rule-breaking is a sign of very sophisticated language use, because to be successful it needs you to be very sensitive to the limitations of your communicative context (e.g. a character limit in an SMS message) and to know what the rules are in the first place. So if the English that your young students produce isn’t to your taste, they’re probably doing something right!
Learn more about the Cambridge Encyclopedia of the English Language and the second edition of David’s Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment.